The only problem with MATLAB, for a beginner, is that it is really expensive. Some universities buy it without the Image Processing Toolbox, in which case it is not so useful. Octave is well supported by the open source community, that is another alternative
“Processing” is a language that is easy to learn and powerful. You might want to take a look at it.
OpenCV is a bit hard to learn at the start, but very powerful. There are enough examples available in OpenCV documentation pages, so I recommend OPenCV over the other two.
solved What is the best way of learning Digital Image processing? [closed]